I got a plug-and-play NRF24 shield for the Pi on Aliexpress
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I want to give workshops with MySensors in which I want to make connecting things as simple as possible. That's why I bought this "Raspi Wireless Shield v1.0" from Aliexpress:
The short version
I traced the pins to their origin, as they are not perfectly connected to the same pins MySensors normally uses.NRF24 -> PI GPIO -> PI PIN
IRQ = ?? unconnected?
MO = io10 = 19 (normal)
CSN = io8 = 24 (normal)
VCC = 3.3v (normal)MI = io9 = 21 (normal)
SCK = io11 = 23 (normal)
CE = io18 = 12 (different!)
GND = GND (normal)The board also supports plugging in the RFM12B 433Mhz transceiver. That thing is another story for another thread.
More details
It's a mysterious shield: and learning more about it took some detective work. The shield itself has some markings: a nice metalic "GEEKROOM" logo (found nothing on that..), and an almost invisible "ukonline2000" logo as well. That last name is from ukonline2000.com which seems to be a Chinese website with Raspberry Pi news. The earliest mention of the board I found was this one.There are a lot of pictures on SmartDuino. There's also an Instructables page that only adds to the confusion because they plugged in the board the wrong way in the first picture.
It also seems to be called the "wireless picobber", including on Amazon.
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In order to use this board you only need to add this parameter to the configure command:
--my-rf24-ce-pin=12The board also has a built-in multicolor LED. I'll see what happens when I use this:
--my-leds-rx-pin=32 or --my-leds-rx-pin=15
Probably nothing, since it should in theory be driven via PWM af 50hz.
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@alowhum you could use MY_INDICATION_HANDLER to pwm the leds if you want to.
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@mfalkvidd Sounds interesting! Could you explain that a bit more? The page you link to doesn't offer any details on what it is.
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Did you get the LEDs to work @alowhum? From the previous messages I gather all you need in order to get the shield to work is to include the configuration flag. Is this correct? Bought the shield, because I wanted to build a more robust setup without dupont cables everywhere.
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FYI for anyone who finds this thread:
I installed the shield on a Raspberry Pi 3 and used --my-leds-rx-pin=15 --my-rf24-ce-pin=12 config parameters. The network seems to work and the red LED is blinking. I have not verified whether the LED blinks when MySensors daemon receives a message, but I would assume it does and does not just blink randomly.
All in all this shield seems like quite a nice way to install the NRF24 radio to a Raspberry Pi, so I would highly recommend it over Dupont cables.
